If you needed to include additional information with your Android application that isn’t already supported by Android Studio and the various functionality natively, one solution is to place the content in the project’s Assets folder. By default, a new projects do not have an Assets folder. You can easily add one through the menu sequence File -> New -> Folder -> Assets Folder. Within this folder. Assets that you add to this folder will now be packaged with you app. They will also be compressed.

You have the option of not compressing the files. You may want to do this if the files are already in a compressed format and thus are not significantly reduced in size by additional compression. If you want a file type exempted for compression, you can direct the compiler to not compress it by making an addition to the build.gradle for the module. If I wanted txt files to be exempted from compression, I would make the following addition.

android {
    aaptOptions {
        noCompress 'txt'
    }
}

Uncompressed files are easy to read. If I placed a files named “readMe.txt” in my assets folder, I can get an InputStream for the file with the following code line.

val myInputStream = context.assets.open("readMe.txt")

You may want to write the files out to the files system for faster access. The following function, when given the name of an asset, will return the absolute path to the location of the file derived from the asset. It first checks to see if the asset has already be extracted to a file. If it has not, then it will take care of extracting it. Accessing the assets this way has an advantage. After an application has been deployed, your application could at runtime check a web location for updated versions of the assets and write them to the file system. Without any further changes in logic, the application could just attempt to read the asset as normal and it will receive the updated version.

    fun assetFilePath(context: Context, assetName: String): String? {
        val file = File(context.filesDir, assetName)
        if (file.exists() && file.length() > 0) {
            return file.absolutePath
        }
        try {
            context.assets.open(assetName).use { inputStream ->
                FileOutputStream(file).use { os ->
                    val buffer = ByteArray(4 * 1024)
                    var read: Int
                    while (inputStream.read(buffer).also { read = it } != -1) {
                        os.write(buffer, 0, read)
                    }
                    os.flush()
                }
                return file.absolutePath
            }
        } catch (e: IOException) {
            Log.e(TAG, "Error process asset $assetName to file path")
        }
        return null
    }

In my next entry, I’ll be using this function to create an application that can also update its content from online content.